The enemy in Tel Aviv is a shapeless wail in the morning. It has no point of origin, it arises from the air, a warning without warning. A noise from a void. The enemy is a tremble in coffee number one, a soft boom over bread and butter at the restaurant last night.  It is the grinning diners who twist toward me when I turn toward them: “Keeps things interesting,” they chuckle. “How is the atmosphere in the South tonight?” asked the anchor on the news  to reporters in the South. “They’re used to it down here,” she gushes. “They’ve…

I have witnessed two wars and even more escalations, and yet I have never been ready for the trauma.  By Abeer Ayoub GAZA - It’s 2 a.m. and the electricity is off for the night. I can’t sleep because of the extremely hot weather and my two sisters are lying next to me checking the news on their cellphones. My sisters and I were discussing whether there will be another Israeli offensive again after the recent attacks between the two sides. We tried to dismiss the idea but everything taking place around us indicates it’s possible. We decided to sleep…

A frank discussion about everything we don’t mention when talking about rockets and bombs and Gaza. Let’s talk about fear, about poverty, about angst and about racism. By Lilach Ben David Let’s talk about Gaza. Let’s talk about a small strip of land that god didn’t forget about, but about which we are certainly trying to forget. Let’s talk about one of the most crowded populations in the world; or to be more precise, it was made to be one of the most densely populated places in the word, because until 1948 most of its inhabitants lived in Yaffa, in Bir…

The news says, 'the IDF doesn't kill children in vain.' And everyone here nods with a serious 'moral gaze.' By Nir Baram While mourning the horrific murder of the three Israeli boys by despicable murderers, yet again we hear the familiar calls of, "in times like these there is no Left and Right. We are all together." While there is "no Left and Right," MK Yariv Levin calls to deal with Israeli Muslims and make them understand that "that which was – will no longer be"; Minister Israel Katz calls to shake the houses in Gaza; Bennett, as always, wants…

Israel has detained over 7,000 Palestinian children over the past 12 years. Many of them report beatings, abuse and a denial of rights by security forces. It's time to put things in the wider context. The detention and abuse of Palestinian children by Israeli security forces has, for a change, been all over the international news media. Unfortunately, it took the severe beating of a 15-year-old boy who happens to have American citizenship for that to happen. Tariq Abu Khdeir was beaten by Israeli Border Police officers in Shuafat last week, during a protest against the brutal killing of of his…

Paradoxically, the feeling that those who were killed could have been our children - feeling as though they are our children - is one of the mechanisms that convinces people to send their children to kill and to die. By Inna Michaeli In the days following the announcement of the murder of the three abducted teenagers, many friends of mine - most of whom identify with the left - shared feelings of sorrow, pain, and loss. What’s been bothering me isn’t that their participation in this national mourning session is fake, but rather that it’s real. It’s the government, the…

The right-wing Israel crowd is on a mission to delegitimize every Palestinian activity that goes beyond silent submission to permanent foreign military rule. Post-modern madness has Israelis very excited, for years now, about the notion that if Israel just “explains” its side of the matter, the world will come to its senses. There is a deep and pervasive myth that Israel is hopelessly incompetent at communications. Israelis speak of Palestinian propaganda as a well-oiled machine, with tentacles in every news media, lobby groups in the halls of power and pressure groups controlling the minds of students and faculty in universities…

And why doesn’t anyone in Israel seem to notice this? Answer: for the same reason that the Palestinian riots started in the first place. With Palestinians protesting violently in East Jerusalem and the Israeli north, and with Palestinians in Gaza, or some of them anyway, firing rockets into Israel’s south, who are the only Palestinians in this land who are not raising hell these days? The Palestinians of the West Bank. They threw a lot of rocks when the Israeli army invaded the Hebron area gunning for Hamas and looking for Eyal Yifrah, Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaar and their kidnappers,…